Méliès’ films [see Part One of this three-part essay] be thought of as marginal to films of mystery and detection, but not if one remembers the many writers and directors of mystery films who have either been accomplished magicians or interested in magic and who have made use of this in their films.

Tod Browning was a director who used theatrical illusion in several of his best films, and the rarely seen Miracles for Sale (MGM, 1939), based on Clayton Rawson’s Death from a Top Hat, makes extensive use of magic in a suspenseful melodrama of stage magicians and psychic phenomena.

Robert Young does a competent job as Michael Morgan, a re-named Rawson Merlini, who has unaccountably acquired a folksy father played by Frank Craven in his best Our Town style. (I wonder if MGM didn’t entertain some faint hope that this film might spawn a series with Young/Craven sharing in some of the popularity of the Ellery Queen father-son duo.)

It’s a well-produced film in which Morgan, through damsel-in-distress Judy Barkley (played by Florence Rice), becomes involved in spiritualism and murder, but the spookiness of the premise is undercut by some conventional thirties’ farce.

There is a seance that has some of the style — and chills — of Browning’s better work, and fanciers of such things will be interested to see Gloria Holden (the daughter of the underrated Dracula’s Daughter) in another of her frozen-face roles but with none of the sexual perversity that made her playing in the earlier film more interesting.

Miracles for Sale comes off as a glossy, entertaining swan song for Browning, and it is unfortunate that most people now know his work through Dracula, which is his least characteristic film and far from his best.

You will not find in Miracles for Sale the brilliance of Freaks (with its superb bridal party sequence), but it’s an accomplished bit of directing and should not be relegated to a footnote in a history of his career.

MIRACLES FOR SALE. MGM, 1939. Robert Young, Florence Rice, Frank Craven, Henry Hull, Lee Bowman, Cliff Clark, Astrid Allwyn. Based on the book Death from a Top Hat, by Clayton Rawson. Director: Tod Browning.

I remember taping this movie from TCM several years ago, not even knowing that it was based on a Clayton Rawson novel. By the time I realized it, I’d boxed up my video cassette collection, and I had no idea which one this movie was on. One of these days I will catalog everything I have on tape, but there must be several hundred of them waiting for me, each with three or four movies on them.

The only other film based on a Rawson novel was The Man Who Wouldn’t Die (1942), but it somehow ended up being a Michael Shayne movie, not Merlini at all.

The novel was No Coffin For The Corpse, and if there was much resemblance between the two, I’d be surprised. Pleasantly so, but still surprised.

This film is available on a Robert Young two-fer from Warner Archive. I own it but hadn’t realized the connection with Death from a Top Hat, a favorite of mine. I’ll have to move it up in my to-be-watched-queue.

Not Rawson and not quite Browning, it isn’t bad but could have been so much more with those bona fides.

Merlini does appear in the Shayne outing as a stage magician Nolan consults. Cesar Romero is closest to Merlini in CHARLIE CHAN ON TREASURE ISLAND also based on a Rawson novel and the pilot for the Merlini series is on YouTube.

First, it’s Charlie Chan AT Treasure Island not ON. Neither Ken Hanke’s Charlie Chan at the Movies or Howard M. Berlin’s Charlie Chan Film Encyclopedia credits Rawson as a source so perhaps we can only say it was inspired by Rawson. Good possibility that one of the script writers had read Rawson.

Then why would he want to advertise himself as “like Houdin” if he loathed him? I think at first he admired him, but later came to realize his idol had feet of clay. He then wrote a book called THE UNMASKING OF ROBERT HOUDIN. Of course, there was a bit of the charlatan in Harry himself.

It may even have been jealousy or feeling that the name gave Houdin some status as a better magician, but Houdini was fairly vocal about the Frenchman’s gifts as a magician.

Whether based on Rawson or not the Cesar Romero character in the Chan film is a cross between Merlini and Don Divallo and it would be surprising if there is no link. I can’t recall if Otto Penzler credits this to a Rawson book or not in his book on the genre or in the anthology Whodunit Houdini?